Naked Wines: Vouchering & Waiting Lists

Moving on to look at the demand side and acquiring customers, you mentioned how vouchering was so effective to get over the big hurdle of buying the first case. How did you make that so effective?

Aside from the front-end metrics of that, what made it really effective is that 70% of the people who use the voucher agreed to become an angel. Their lifetime value of that consumer, attached to that voucher, became so big that we were able to really give that voucher real value and really give people a good deal. Then we rolled out something else.

I went up to Brisbane, to play in an old man rugby tournament, and after a day of playing, we all went out and we walked past a nightclub or a bar. There was a guy at the front saying, come on in; first drink is free. We didn’t want to go in there and we kept walking. As we walked on, I was thinking about why we didn’t want to go in there. We went to the next club and there was a line up for the club and all the guys said, we need to go to this club and they all lined up. I said to them all, I’m going back to the hotel, and I just starting writing things down, thinking this through. Had we taken the free drink offer and gone into the club, we would have gone in there with a really judgmental attitude of, this place is going to be shit. It would have had to have been amazing to shift our mindset. When the guys lined up for the nightclub, when they got through the door, they didn’t walk through saying, is this place going to be terrible. They walked through the door saying, I hope this place accepts me; I hope I fit in.

I immediately went back and said, we need to roll out a waiting list for Naked. It had another reason for that and that was, how do we balance out fast growth with supply. We had come close to running out of wine on our first Christmas. What we did was, we rolled out a waiting list. We said, you can use your voucher, but you don’t get to be an angel straightaway; you have to join a waiting list. It was a 28 to 30 day waiting list. Within a month, we had 2,000 people on the waiting list. That did something which we hadn’t appreciated which was, it meant that anybody who stopped being an angel realized they would have to go and join the end of the queue again. You can stop being an angel any time you want, but now there was a reason not to, because you would have to go to the back of the queue.

But even more powerfully, people came to the site with a voucher and bought wine and what we really needed them to do was to understand what Naked was, that it was this incredible place of funded wine makers and that it was only possible to make the wines because of them. Over the 30 day time that people were on that waiting list, the open rates of emails that we sent them were in the high 90s, because we would email them to tell them of their progression in the waiting list. They would get an email saying, you’ve just moved up in the waiting list. But in the body of the email, we had broken out our story into a set of components and we just told them the story. By the time they came off the waiting list, they were ready to buy. They had come through the doors and we even used to send them a video that Sam Plunkett and I shot of us partying in his vineyard, telling them they’d joined the party and they knew the entire story. What it meant was, people came with a voucher but, 30 days later, understood that this wasn’t some cheap voucher concept. But actually, they had discovered this amazing model and now they were a part of that community and, by being part of that community, they were really doing some good, they were smart and they were important and that created that stickiness.